Guest Post: When Pests Move In

It’s easy to make a serious mess around your attic, garage or basement around the house, losing those spaces to excessive clutter. There is a point, though, at which things become not just frustrating and dangerous for you, but also quite welcoming for a number of pests. Adding more clutter around your home increases your chance for pest infestation risk and hides their nests. Once they’re inside your home things will get even worse, so you will need to work on eliminating those hiding spots to keep that from happening in the first place. What really makes clutter and hoarding great for pests to enjoy? Well, first of all, pests need a base of three elements to survive and thrive, as demonstrated by the following tips:

1. Hide & Seek

Pests can hide in boxes, clothing, piles of paper, inside your walls, inside furniture, sometimes even inside a vacuum cleaner if you haven’t really put it to good use lately. If you deny them shelter, they will have a much harder time surviving in your home and making a mess out of things. Disturb the boxes and move things around and out of your home. Most pests don’t want to be near the action.

2. Food sources

Pests will be attracted to a number of things that present a food source for them, such as food scraps and debris, as well as dust in case of a lot of insects. Ensure they get no chance to enjoy a viable food source, as they must not be allowed to thrive around your home. Eliminate dirty food containers, empty the recycle bin weekly (or more often), keep garbage bags with food scraps properly stored, and mostly importantly, do it all immediately. Once dirty plates or containers get hidden behind other clutter, it’ll become out of sight out of mind…for you. Not for pests.

3. Water sources

Dripping or leaky pipes, condensation, and more will attract pests to an area, not to mention the fact that mold may form. Mold, aside from being a directly air quality concern for you, it may also serve as food for some species such as the foreign grain beetle. The beetles might find their way into your pantry, or congregate around the damp areas near plumbing in your walls. Rats, mice, raccoons, bed bugs, cockroaches and other insects are all nightmares you really don’t want to have to deal with.

4. Health hazards Spread by pests

Rats and mice are capable of spreading pathogens through their feces and urine, as they tend to mark their territories and communicate through their urine. They can also contaminate food sources and surfaces, especially when you’re not around and you’re not looking. Roaches can also cause asthma and allergies in young children. Bed bugs may migrate around your entire home if you’re not careful, and they tend to leave some pretty painful and annoying bites. Rodents may also chew on wires, which could instigate fires, which brings us to our last point.

5. Unpleasant environments

If you have ever had the unfortunate fate of seeing what a place looks like after rats have gone through it, then you probably know what it feels like. The heavy, terrible smell of rat urine and droppings, the constant gnawing on boxes, furniture and more, the stress of letting the pest pass you into another room if you’re not careful. There’s also risk for your family pet. Are you comfortable letting your dog or cat wander the house freely if you have a flea infestation, or nesting squirrels? All of this can be avoided if you focus on decluttering, junk removal, waste removal, furniture clearance and so on where you can keep things under control so pest infestations will never happen in the first place.

Article provided by London House Clearance Ltd. – a team of professionals that can help you with the garden waste removal and the garage clearance.

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There are some days when I contemplate exactly what it’ll be like to clean up my Mother’s house some day. The monumental piles of stuff is a given, but what will the walls, carpet, counter tops, and the actual structure of the house be like? My best guess? Covered in mold.

And the last thing I want is to compound the toxicity with more chemicals, but luckily there are some natural options. Things have been pretty busy for me lately, so I invited Heather Roberts to guest post. Mold might run rampant in a hoarder’s home, but really, it can be found in any house where dampness is left unattended.

Guest Post: Cleaning Mold Naturally

One of the greatest problems in any home, given the right circumstances is the uncontrolled proliferation of mold due to neglect. Mold and mildew can be a real pain in hot and humid conditions, and that makes them a doubly serious issue when you have large quantities of personal belongings in a home that have not been moved for years. Such is usually the case with hoarders, so this makes mold something that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. Even though you can usually keep it at bay through the use of dehumidifiers, you can still experience it. There are a good deal of natural materials you can use to spray or remove mildew and mold. They can be a wonderful substitute for the hazardous fumes bleach produces. In this article we will cover most of them as possible solutions to your problem:

You can use tea tree oil, which is often found in health food stores as a great cleaning material that acts as a natural mold killer. It may be the most expensive option on this list and it may have a strong scent that disappears within a few days, however it also has one of the most effective qualities in our list, completely eliminating mold from ceilings, rugs, showers and so forth. You can combine two teaspoons of it with two cups of water, then using that as a spray you can eliminate mold on any given spot. You don’t need to rinse it and it can be used even months down the line if you need to.

Another possible option is using grapefruit seed extract, though it’s also expensive. Unlike tea tree oil however, it has no scent that lingers. Combine about 20 drops of it into about two cups of water and use it in much the same way as you would with tea tree oil.

Next on our list is a natural mold killer so widespread and right under our noses, that we often overlook it without even knowing its qualities. Distilled white vinegar is said to kill up to 82% of all mold species, acting fairly quickly but leaving its scent behind for a few short hours as a result. If you have light stains, then you can dilute the vinegar with water in a 50:50 ratio for good results as well. If you’re experiencing mildew forming on the bottom sides of your rugs or carpeting, then you can stop it by spraying it with distilled white vinegar and letting it dry that way. It should kill most spores with ease, leaving your carpet safe.

If you have a plastic shower curtain and it has suffered mildew and mold, then you don’t need to worry about it at all. You can simply toss it in the washing machine alongside two bath towels on the gentlest setting. Then you need to pour about half a cup of baking soda inside as well as a half cup of vinegar. The baking soda should go in during the washing cycle, while the vinegar needs to go in during the rinse cycle. Let it dry out and you’re almost good as new!

You can also use a 3% hydrogen peroxide for mildew and mold as well. If you use it on its own, you can wipe most mold right off the affected area.

When you have mildew-stained garments, you can make a paste of lemon juice and salt. Rub it against the area affected by the mold or mildew. Repeat that until you remove the stain completely and let it dry in the sun.

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That’s the question that plagues all of us right? When you’re full of the urge to clean up and are standing there beside the trash can with something with “potential” in your hand…what do you do? Put it back and keep it indefinitely? Chuck it before you change your mind? Put it aside to either sell or give away? Sometimes, the options are overwhelming. I get it. I’ve been there, too.

Today I’m presenting a guest post from Natalie, a storage expert from London, England, while I work on decluttering my own basement. Again. She offers some direction for decision making as you sort through your own stuff this fall. I especially like the 2 Month Test. If you have any additional suggestions for making decluttering easier, please leave a comment!

Guest Post: To Keep or Not to Keep

Spacing woes plague every household. No matter how meticulously you plan your storage, you end up with stuff littered around. Add to this an obsessive-compulsive prone person, life can become a living nightmare. Stuff scattered all over the place becomes an eyesore and hampers the free movement (physical or of the eye) around the house. A messy house attracts negative energies and may make the inhabitants irritable.

A perfectly organized home is highly desirable, but an unachievable target. Especially, owing to the hoarding mentality today, the problem is even graver. We don’t want to throw away stuff and we don’t have an appropriate place for storing it. Packing up boxes and shoving them over the loft is no solution. You finally have to let go of things that are no longer required. Here are a few tips and tricks that can help you get rid of the clutter:

Bring it on

The first step to the solution of the problem is to accept the problem. Let go of procrastination and delve into the task head on. However, keep your targets realistic. Aim for a cupboard or a drawer per day. Set aside a specific time that you would solely dedicate to the de-cluttering.

Dealing with the devil

If you are a woman, you might secretly agree to the fact that it is your stuff that occupies the maximum place in the house. The infinite clothes, bags, shoes, and accessories always pose a storage problem. You cannot cramp up your bags and shoes, hence they occupy even more space. Here, you have an old formula, only until now you’ve not been sticking to it- every time you buy something new, throw away something old. This may be highly painful at times, but the key is to be strict. You weren’t going to wear that old fashioned skirt again anyway!

Sports stuff

Every home has some sort of old sports gear that keeps on eating up space, without being used, year after year. Whether it’s a board game or old baseball bats or a fishing set, it’s best to get done with them. If you have some functional sports gear you no longer use, you can donate it to a kids’ orphanage (add to your karma account). At the same time, there might be things that are no longer of use or do not function anymore. For these, call up the local recycling agency and they’d be happy to take care of it. If you have some heavy gym equipment that is no longer of much use, it is best to call a removals service to get rid of it. We don’t you to sprain your back while following our advice!

Homeless Oddities

You would find a number of things like old books, CDs, magazines, stationary, electronics etc., which have no apparent use to you, yet they stay in your house forever. Of course, some of these have an emotional value to you- some may be gifts, some may be too rare to be thrown away, but the majority of them can go to junk. Anything broken can be chucked away immediately.

Crockery

Apart from that tea set that belonged to your grandmother’s grandmother, you can do away with a lot of idle crockery in your house. Nevertheless, you never have the heart to throw away some precious glassware. Spark up your kinder side and gift them to a friend or sibling. In fact, you can get into a deal with them to share crockery. This way, you’ll have more variety without being bothered about the storage issues.

The two-month test

Even when you are done with dealing most of the above mentioned stuff, there would still be items you neither have the heart to throw away nor have the space to put them. For these, you have to be strict with yourself and let them undergo the 2-month test. Box up all such stuff, mark the date on the box, and put it away. If in two months, you don’t open the box for anything in it, you can safely chuck it away. It would be best to give away the closed box as it is. If you open it, chances are you’d come across something that will tempt you and you’ll succumb to keeping it again, re-launching the clutter cycle.

Storage Rentals

My home city, London, England is dotted with self-storage companies, but it is a better option to first manage the clutter and go to a storage facility as a last resort. It may come in helpful in a situation where you have your heart set on new type of furniture, but are not being able to sell your old one at the desired price. You can temporarily store the furniture in a storage facility.

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For many of us, putting up wallpaper or repainting our walls might mean an afternoon of pulling furniture away from the wall and adding some quick colour to our room. Minimal disruption. Or if you’re not handy, you might be smarter to hire an expert tradesperson to help with a significant project. What if your house is so crowded, the tradespeople have trouble doing their job? What if piles of stuff put these people in jeopardy for falling and injury?

Working in a Hoarder’s House

This is the first in a series of posts told from the perspective of people who have been affected by compulsive hoarder, but who are not relatives. These are the emergency response workers, police, fire fighters, trades people, service people, and case workers who must enter hoarded homes and put themselves at risk. To start us off, I present the insights offered by a skilled house painter. This person (who has requested anonymity in respect for past clients) has an amazing perspective of compulsive hoarding you might never have considered. I was fascinated when this person emailed me and started to share this story. With permission, I present it as a guest post…an inside look into what it’s like to work inside the home of a crowded mind.

A View From the Trades

by Paint N. Brush

While it’s true that many hoarders avoid allowing trade and service people into their homes, quite as many actually do. I’ve worked in the trades for twenty years, primarily doing interior painting and wallpapering. I would estimate that thirty percent of my clients have been hoarders. An additional fifteen percent were clearly on their way. I think that is a huge statistic. My perspective is, I believe, somewhat counter to the usual notions of hoarders. My clients have all been well-to-do, have not yet isolated themselves completely, and are for the most part quite high-functioning individuals. They have not quite arrived at what one can foresee as their inevitable endpoint of total, quiet, desperate chaos. I seem to catch them at the disastrous turning points of their lives.

They share very interesting commonalities: All have been highly intelligent, driven, gifted in one or several of the arts, and began as “collectors” of things. Many of these collections do have actual market value, as opposed to collections of paper cups or plastic margarine tubs. But all have in fact have begun that insidious overlap from collections of dozens of vases never used, to cupboards packed with junk. All are in variant stages of goat trails throughout their homes. All say that if they can just get the house straightened out, if they just had a week to themselves, everything would be fine. If I, the tradesman, could just get that wall cleaned and painted right away, the trajectory of their lives will miraculously self-correct because they then will be able to move all those boxes over there from here and they’ll have something resembling a room. All are in various stages of serious, really severe unhappiness, which they do express via either action or word, more often through actions – compulsive spontaneous shopping, sudden brief spurts of rage, frequent expressions of frustration usually directed at the wrong people. They have an utter inability to experience the feeling of happiness. I’m not talking about “being happy”. (Nebulous phrase.) I’m talking about an actual inability to FEEL happy, to feel even a brief moment of true delight in the course of their day. They will say they’re happy, they’ll use the words, but there’s nothing real behind it. All are causing deep tensions within their families, all have first-degree relatives with addictions in other forms – alcohol, food, drugs – all are successful in their careers, all are constantly frantic. All claim to have had “perfect” childhoods. That is the word they use. (I don’t believe that for a minute.)

My contracts in their homes have all been either long-term or intermittent over long periods of time. Consequently, an interesting result takes place – the tradesman becomes part of the furniture. The household gets so used to your presence that they come, go, and play out their lives without a thought to your presence. I’ve come to believe that it’s a comfort to them to have us there, once they know we are trustworthy. But for us it becomes a window into hoarder worlds which can be distressing, saddening, and hopeless, no matter how much financial comfort or family presence they might enjoy.

Imagine if you’d like to rejuvenate and paint your livingroom. To do it properly, you would like to clean, sand, and paint all your woodwork trim in that room. That’s windows, doors, door casings, baseboard trim, sometimes ceiling trimwork too. You would like a crisp cleanly painted ceiling. You want to clean your walls, patch any defects, and give them new life with a new color of paint, which you will have to hand-cut in with a brush around every window and ceiling edge and doorway, then roll the walls with a roller. TWICE. Walls always, always have to be done twice to be done right. Oftentimes all the trimwork must also be painted twice. You would prefer this room to be empty of objects when you undertake this. You would prefer dropcloths on the floor to take roller spatter. (There is ALWAYS roller spatter, no matter how good you are at this.) This work takes an organized mind. You can’t cut the top walls in while the ceiling paint is wet. You can’t do baseboard tops while the bottom wall is wet. And so on.

Now imagine this same room, same project goals, crammed end to end and top to bottom with valuable antiques, boxes and boxes and boxes of junk, dozens of houseplants, a huge flat-screen T.V., heavy-framed paintings on the walls, enormous dust-laden cobwebs on the ceiling, pet fur, pet paraphernalia, and dirt, dirt, dirt. Normal household dirt, but never addressed because one can’t move within the room to clean, so the dirt is really, really bad. Paint won’t adhere to dirt. Never has, never will. You must clean first. There is no place to move the stuff, nowhere to put it, because the rest of the house is packed too. There is no floor space. You can’t see the floor at all.

My highest injury rate has been in hoarder homes, bar none. There is no room to move or maneuver yourself, your ladders, your paint cans, your wallpaper safely. In twenty years I have had only one breakage of a homeowner item, which seems like a miracle to me, but I myself have experienced significant bruise, breakage and falls for the sake of those blasted items.

I’ve learned that with hoarders the job will never be done. They always want more, and I’m retiring from the trades because of it. I feel for them, it’s very painful stuff to see. My hoarder clients are the personalities I’ve been most fond of in many, many ways. They touch my heart. But they drive me crazy, and I must finally opt out. In some subconscious way they look to me and other tradespeople to be the repairmen of their emotional lives – which they confuse with their physical possessions – and that is not a possible thing to do. Sadly we can’t repair that for them, much as we might wish to.

Why? Because a Canadian company (Bell Canada) is donating .5 cents to mental health research for every tweet and text using that hash tag. My Twitter feed was alive with people sharing their support and stories!! I loved it! Yesterday was a big day, but we should all be committed to keeping the conversation going every day to stop the stigma of mental health. This goes not just for compulsive hoarding, but for ANY mental disorder.

Final tallies aren’t in just yet…but the last time I checked, Bell was reporting 85, 536, 167 texts, tweets, and long distance calls that all qualified under #BellLetsTalk. Multiple that by .5 cents each, and that’s well over 4 million dollars raised! In ONE day!! In ONE country!!!

I bet that will put some minds at ease, huh? 😉

Guest Post: Squalor Holler

Today I have a guest post up at Squalor Holler. Yep, that’s right…there are a whole bunch of fellow bloggers sharing their experience as children of compulsive hoarders. And Sarah at Squalor Holler has a great series going on her blog sharing the stories of fellow COHs. And today is MY day!

So scoot on over to read more about my interview, and be sure to give Sarah some love in the comments. She’s doing her part to keep the conversation going.

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I feel so honoured to have been given to opportunity to write a guest post for Psychology Today. Recently, the same doctor conducting the studies about compulsive hoarders and their relationships touched base with me and we’ve been having some great conversation about the lack of resources on this topic. Truly, people like me, the hoarders son, and other children of hoarders have limited help in sorting out our feelings and relationships with our hoarding loved ones.

Raising Awareness

Dr. Amy Przeworski, from Case Western Reserve University, wants to raise awareness…and I’m hopeful when I hear mental health experts like Amy getting involved. I wrote a guest post about what it’s like to be on one side of the wall of stuff while my Mother exists on the other. I hope you’ll hop over to read my post on Dr. Przeworski’s blog…and stick around to read more of her own posts. She speaks of anxiety and other family mental health issues worth reading.